Web design in Cornwall

Cornwall Council's figures put visitor spend at about £2 billion a year, from more than 4 million overnight visits and 14 million day trips, roughly 15% of the county's economy on a mean sector wage of £16,177. That money does not arrive evenly. Plenty of trades here bank the year by September and then hold their nerve until Easter.

Which makes the shape of a payment matter as much as the size of it. A year committed to in March, by a business that will not see its money until July, is the wrong way round, and it is why so many Cornish trades want an arrangement they can stop when the sums stop working.

It also means the site can follow your calendar instead of the tourist board's. Storm work picks up as the visitors leave. A supplier to holiday lets is flat out in the fortnight before Whitsun and quiet by November. If what you want on the front page in winter is different from what you want in June, tell me in September and it gets swapped over.

Cornwall is about ninety miles end to end and the driving is worse than the mileage suggests. The A30 dualling between Chiverton Cross and Carland Cross opened to traffic in June 2024, and those 8.7 miles genuinely changed how far east a Truro or Redruth firm can reach and still be home for tea. It did nothing whatsoever for anyone trying to get down the Lizard, out onto the Roseland or up to Boscastle in the third week of August.

The coverage question deserves a real answer on the page rather than the word "Cornwall" and a hopeful map. Enquiries you were never going to accept still cost you the call, the apology and occasionally a quote you wrote before checking the postcode. Name the towns, the roads, and the point past which you charge for travel or politely decline. Claiming the whole county while you really work between Hayle and St Austell reads as optimistic at best.

The tempting fix is a page for every place name: Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Helston, Camborne, on down the list, each one the same paragraph with the town swapped. It is quick to produce and it looks like thorough local coverage.

Google has published guidance on doorway pages since 2015, and it describes exactly that pattern — batches of pages built to catch searches and funnel everyone to the same place, offering nothing to the person who lands on one. I have looked at sites carrying hundreds of them where the wording barely shifts between towns. What follows is usually a slow flattening rather than a dramatic penalty: none of the pages is strong enough to rank, and the ones that deserved to are competing against fifty of their own siblings.

One page naming the places you genuinely serve, describing work you actually did in them, lined up with a Google Business Profile carrying the right hours, service area and your own photographs. That takes longer to put together and it holds up for years, which is also why this site has no village list of its own.

Coast & Quay Property Care cover maintenance and holiday-let support from Bude round to Looe and Polperro, and hardly any of their customers are standing in the property when they make contact. The owner is in Guildford or Bristol, the guests arrive Friday, and something has failed in a kitchen two hundred miles away from them.

So that site is built around photographs and triage rather than persuasion. It has to make the coverage area unmistakable, show the work that gets done inside a changeover window, and give someone who has never met anybody in Cornwall a reason to hand over a key safe code.

The word Cornwall does some unhelpful work on a website. To a customer up country it says holidays, which is useful if you sell to visitors and misleading if you do not.

The county's trade is wider than the postcard. United Downs near Redruth began exporting power from the UK's first deep geothermal plant in early 2026, with lithium extraction alongside it, on the same granite the old mines worked. Food and drink producers have had the Made in Cornwall scheme since 1991, Trading Standards audits sitting behind the Engine House logo and over 250 members using it. A listing in a directory that a real organisation maintains and checks is worth more than months of blogging, and it is a job I will ask you to go and do yourself.

Most work here still arrives by recommendation, which is an advantage right up until you watch what the person does next. Your name goes into a WhatsApp group or across the school gate, and before ringing, they search it. If nothing sensible comes back, the recommendation dies quietly and nobody tells you it happened.

So the site's job here is to back up what they were told: the same trading name, the same trade, the same patch and the same phone number, with photographs of jobs that are yours. Where it says something different — another business name over the door, or a mobile number nobody recognises — the person who passed your name on gets quietly doubted along with you.